past events & lectures

Two-day Conference co-sponsored by Scientific Program Committee and UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Modernism, Psychoanalysis and the Embodied Mind

Friday, September 18, 2015
7:30 PM

Saturday, September 19, 2015
9:30 am - 5 pm

The international conference, Modernism, Psychoanalysis and the Embodied Mind, will engage an interdisciplinary network of scholars and practitioners who bring the radical insights of modernist literature, as well as performance and the visual arts, into dialogue with clinical practice in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychiatry, neuropsychology, and the mental healthcare offered at the end of life. Presentations will focus on the resources modernism offers for creatively understanding the experiences of body and mind that form the core material of the psychoanalytic encounter, but are poorly served by realist models of self.

Elizabeth Barry, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. She is the author of Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché (Palgrave, 2006) and has edited issues of International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Beckett Studies, and Journal of Medical Humanities. Her interests lie in and between modernist narrative, performance, medicine, and old age, and she is completing a monograph on aging in modern literature and thought. She has, with colleagues Ulrika Maude and Laura Salisbury, held two government grants to work with doctors, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists on using literature and performance to investigate disorders of self.

Sander L. Gilman, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Illness and Image: Case Studies in the Medical Humanities appeared with Transition Press in 2015; his most recent edited volume, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Collaboration and Conflict in the Age of Diaspora was published with the Hong Kong University Press in 2014. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986.

Jonathan Heron, Ph.D. is Senior Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, University of Warwick. His work as a theatre practitioner has included Diary of a Madman & Discords (Warwick Arts Centre), The Nativity & Mythologies (Pegasus Theatre, Oxford), Rough for Theatre II & Ohio Impromptu (Oxford Playhouse), Play without a Title (Belgrade Theatre, Coventry), and Phaedra's Love & Crave (Underbelly, Edinburgh). He is co-author of Open-space Learning: A Study in Transdisciplinary Pedagogy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), a contributor to Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge University Press, 2012), British Journal of Psychiatry (RC Psych, 2014), and Shakespeare on the University Stage (CUP, 2015). Dr. Heron was co-editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) for its first special issue on performance and he co-convenes the Performance-as-Research working group for the International Federation for Theatre Research. He has also facilitated workshops for the National Health Service and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Rina Kim, Ph.D. is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Auckland. She is a specialist in Anglo-Irish literature as well as British and European Theater. Her many publications include a book on Samuel Beckett entitled Women and Ireland as Beckett’s Lost Others: Beyond Mourning and Melancholia and her current research includes a project provisionally entitled Drama and the Embodied Mind.

Ludovica Lumer, Ph.D. is a neurobiologist and philosopher. Since 1997 she has been working in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at University College London where, with Semir Zeki, she has conducted seminal research in the field of neuroaesthetics studying the relationship between visual perception and artistic representation. In 2005 she opened an art gallery in Milan. More recently, she has been increasingly involved in curatorial and educational projects, collaborating with major Italian art institutions such as Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, the Madre Museum in Naples, and the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato. She has published books as well as numerous scientific papers and is a regular contributor to art catalogues. Dr. Lumer has lectured for many years in the Psychology Department of Milano-Bicocca University. She currently lives in New York and is a candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

Ulrika Maude, Ph.D. is Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and Senior Lecturer in Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Bristol, UK. She is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, 'Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind’. Dr Maude is the author of Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2015), Beckett and Phenomenology (Continuum, 2009), and The Body and the Arts (Palgrave, 2009). With Elizabeth Barry and Laura Salisbury, she has recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities (2015) on ‘Beckett, Medicine and the Brain’. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Beckett Studies, and is currently finishing two books, Beckett and Medicine and Modernism and Medical Culture.

Lois Oppenheim, Ph.D. is University Distinguished Scholar, Professor of French, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University where she teaches courses in modernism, literature, and applied psychoanalysis. A Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Society, she is the author of over 90 papers and the author or editor of twelve books (with a thirteenth in press). Among her most recent books are Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion, awarded the 2013 Courage to Dream Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association; A Curious Intimacy: Art and Neuro-Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalysis and the Creative Endeavor; and The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett's Dialogue With Art. Dr. Oppenheim is co-creator of the documentaries How to Touch a Hot Stove: Thought and Behavioral Differences in a Society of Norms (Honorable Mention, SAMHSA Awards) and Daniel, Debra, and Drew (in production).

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Ph.D. is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Literature and co-founder and senior curator of Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, where he organizes exhibitions, conferences, and lectures. Prof. Rabaté is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the Editorial Boards of Interfaces, James Joyce Quarterly, James Joyce Annual,, The European Journal of English Studies, Modernism/Modernity, English Text Construction, and Textual Practice. His most recent authored or edited publications include The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press); Art, or Listen to Silence: Soun-Gui Kim in Conversation with Derrida, Nancy and Cage (Slought); and 1922: Culture, Literature, Politics (Cambridge University Press). Forthcoming are Think, Pig! Beckett at the limit of the Human (Fordham University Press); The Pathos of Distance (Bloomsbury); The Value of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press); and After Derrida (Cambridge University Press).

Laura Salisbury, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Medicine and English Literature at the University of Exeter, in the UK. She has published widely on modernism, including a book entitled Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (2012). She is co-editor of Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems (2010) and is currently completing a book on literary modernism and neurological conceptions of language called Aphasic Modernism: A Revolution of the Word. Her future projects include a book, Slow Modernism, a study of waiting times in the clinical encounter. She is a graduate of the Foundation Program run by the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London.

Louis A. Sass, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Rutgers University—where he is also associated with the Program in Comparative Literature and the Center for Cognitive Science. He is the author of Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought; The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizoprenic Mind; and numerous articles on schizophrenia, phenomenological psychopathology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, modernism/postmodernism, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. In 2010 Sass received the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation for “the most scholarly contribution to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge.”

Theodore Shapiro, M.D. is Professor emeritus at the Weill-Cornell Medical College and a practicing Psychoanalyst and Adult and Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist. He is a co- principle investigator on a study of psychodynamic psychotherapy for children and adolescents with anxiety disorders. Dr. Shapiro has more than 250 scholarly and research publications and is the author of seven books. He edited the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association from 1983-1994 and has received the Rado, Brill, Hartmann, and Philip Wilson awards and is a training/supervising analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

Educational Objectives:
After attending the talk by Sander Gilman, participants will be able to:

1. Describe how ego psychology, specifically the work of Anna Freud, plays a role in shaping the idea of prejudice and its social impact.
2. Describe how prejudice becomes a psychopathological category in the course of the 20th century.

After attending the talk by Louis Sass, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the nature of the surprisingly close relationship between the phenomenological tradition and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
2. Describe the ways in which Jacques Lacan's theoretical transformation of psychoanalysis brings it in line with the 20th century cultural and esthetic traditions of "modernism"

After attending the talk by Theodore Shapiro, participants will be able to:

1) Describe how modernism (early 21st C) and computerized social media modify the former binding constellations of family and community
2) Describe how Nietzschian eternal recurrence and Freudian Oedipal demands operate as constructs that view the present in terms of moderated replays of the past
3) Explain why modern social connectedness, which allows for influence from a broader swath of community while offering less intimacy and intensity, offers fewer opportunities to cultivate tolerance for anxiety and frustration
4) Explain in what way the new technologies broaden the community for the developing child and lessen the power of the father, which is tantamount to symbolic patricide.

Physicians: This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of (2.75) AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE INFORMATION FOR ALL LEARNERS: None of the planners and presenters of this CME program have any relevant financial relationships to disclose.

Psychologists: New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education programs for psychologists. New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

DISCLOSURE: None of the planners or presenters of this CE program has any relevant financial relationships to disclose.

Persons with disabilities: The building is wheelchair accessible and has an elevator. Please notify the registrar in advance if you require accommodations.